Depending on your perspective, San Francisco coyotes are either malevolent, pet-hunting mini-wolves, or they’re simple floofs with as much right to live in the city as humans.
Recognizing that we as a species probably don’t know as much as we should about our four-legged neighbors, six intrepid researchers recently took it upon themselves to figure out the city-dwelling animals’ habits. The team, led by UC Davis PhD student Tal Caspi, decided the best way to do this was to spend two and a half years sifting through — God bless surgical glove inventors — coyote poop.
Since the animals were entirely uncooperative when it came to mailing scat samples into the lab, between September 2019 and April 2022, Caspi and co. (presumably very carefully) ran around parks, golf courses and gardens picking up more than 1,200 coyote number twos. Almost 700 of these were of a quality that could be subjected to territory-level analyses. The results? Turns out that the greatest source of food for city ’yotes — 78% in fact — comes from human leftovers. Though the animals are also partial to snacking on gophers, rats, voles, birds and (oh, the humanity!) raccoons. (Raccoons!)
Earlier this week, the team published their complete findings in Ecosphere, an open-access ecology journal, and was considerate enough to include handy graphs for the lay person. Like this one that shows the animal-based food that coyotes are most likely to consume in San Francisco:
The green, red and purple lines on the lower chart reflect the period when young coyotes seek out their own territory, mating season and pupping season, respectively. Looks like chicken is the year-round favorite!
